We're back with the top list! Did you miss us? We missed you! We are off to a great start in 2009. During our break I pondered something - what funky facts are there out in the world about eyeglasses and vision? I scoured the internet to see what I could find. After a good week of researching, I came up with the five best interesting facts about eyes, eyeglasses, and the like!
5: While the origin of eyeglasses is relatively unknown and widely debated, reading glasses first appeared on the scene in Italy around 1260 C.E. They were initially designed to help the elderly in their quest for reading. The reading glasses were insanely popular very quickly but there was one drawback - arms had not been invented for the prescriptio eyeglasses and the frames kept slipping down the nose! The Spanish tried to remedy this by tying ribbons to the frames and then wrapping them around their ears but the local folks were not so keen on that idea.
4: The human eyeball weighs approximately one ounce. Imagine all the work your eyes do: reading, discovering, watching TV, refracting light, being pretty...etc. They do all this work within one ounce. Amazing! The human body truly astounds us!
3: Wear a gold earring or eyeglasses? Personally, I would choose eyeglasses but sailors once believed that wearing a gold earring would help to improve their eyesight. We here at GlassesUSA are a little unsure of how a cold earring could possibly improve your eyesight or what the correlation between the gold earring and the eyes are the sailors must have had a reason!
2: Sunglasses came on the scene in 1929 when a young innovator, Sam Foster, convinced the Woolworth's store on the Atlantic City Boardwalk to sell his new brand of sunglasses - FosterGrant. They became an instant sensation in the 1930's when worn by the era's most popular movie stars! The American culture has Sam Foster to thank for making something like eye protection from UVA and UVB rays look so cool and hip!
It's hard to pick one last fact that could possibly be more interesting than wearing a gold earring to help your eyesight but here goes...
1: Thomas Jefferson had more eyeglasses than I do. During his presidency, Jefferson ordered eye glasses from Philadelphia optician, John McAllister. This grew into a two year union where Jefferson would instruct McAllister to fashion glasses for him for any occasion. The process would take about two weeks to manufacture each frame. On occasion, McAllister would send President Jefferson a pair of frames that Jefferson was not too pleased about. The result would be a written letter and a diagram of exactly what kind of eyeglass frame the president would like - hand drawn by Thomas Jefferson himself.